Monthly Archives: November 2015

There was some news made recently when Orly Airport in Paris, France suffered some apparent downtime of its Windows 3.1-based DECOR system which provides Runway Visual Range (RVR) information to pilots. Tech news media was abuzz with ridicule for any enterprise still running what it termed as such “antiquated” systems (referring to both DECOR and Windows 3.1, and in several instances, referring to Windows XP and “UNIX” as similarly antiquated (see here, here, and here for examples).

Unfortunately, what many of these news outlets don’t understand is that after all of the years in service, it simply may not make economic sense to replace a working system simply because there’s a new OS or application version available (likely with new and unknown flaws and potential pitfalls). Perhaps a newer version of a critical application did away with what is to that customer a must-have feature, or perhaps the application has been orphaned altogether, and nothing else currently available seems to be able to do as efficient a job as what is already in place.

Arca Noae understands the value of these systems. OS/2 still provides “a better DOS than DOS and a better [16-bit] Windows than Windows” due to its preemptive multitasking capabilities and crash protection, so multiple Windows 3.1 and/or DOS sessions may be started and run independently of one another, where a critical application is less likely to be brought down simply because some other application crashed in a different session.

If you have a need to run mature applications on OS/2, Windows 3.1, or DOS, Arca Noae can help extend the life of your investment in those platforms and those applications. Our OS/2 & eCS Drivers and Software package subscription – available now – can assist in running OS/2 or eComStation on newer hardware. Our upcoming OS/2 release, codenamed Blue Lion, is being designed to provide an installable solution to deploy new systems with an updated OS/2, fully capable of handling those mature DOS and Windows 3.1 applications, as well as native OS/2 applications and ported Linux applications on modern hardware or in a virtualized environment.

Perhaps you need expertise in handling such a transition or in maintaining your mature infrastructure. Arca Noae’s experienced engineers and consultants can provide those services, as well, practically anywhere in the world. Need us? Contact us.

We’ve been getting so many great questions about Blue Lion, along with some really positive feedback to the product, our mailbox is overflowing! We’re most grateful to the OS/2 community for this input.

To help answer some of the most frequently asked questions, we’ve started updating our FAQ page with some Blue Lion issues concerning content, scheduling, pricing, and logistics. We’ll add more as we move forward with development.

Meanwhile, if you have a question about Blue Lion which isn’t listed in the FAQ, or a comment or request you’d like to share, please feel free to contact us.

Finally, if you’d like to stay informed concerning Blue Lion’s progress and development status, please feel free to register on our website and you’ll be automatically subscribed to receive emails when our blog is updated. Remember that we don’t sell or otherwise share any email addresses or personal information with any third parties, so your account data is completely confidential (please review our Privacy Policy for more information).

If you have had experience coding for OS/2, we want to hear from you. Arca Noae is actively seeking new devs for various phases of Blue Lion and related development. All positions are for independent contractors (no employees), some are volunteer, and some (for more detailed, technical work) will be compensated.

Please send an email of inquiry to dev-info AT arcanoae DOT com, and we will respond with a brief questionnaire including a request for references. If accepted, you will be asked to execute a standard non-disclosure agreement.

If there is something which you’d like to see in Blue Lion, whether as a desktop enhancement, an included application, or a device driver, and you feel competent to provide it, please let us know!

We’ll be posting progress on Blue Lion as we move ahead, so keep watching our blog for updates. In the meantime, if you have an OS/2-based infrastructure, and you are concerned about the age or stability of your current equipment, we’d love to hear from you.

Arca Noae has become an IBM business partner and has an agreement in place that enables us to produce our own OS/2 distribution. We have given this project the code name “Blue Lion” (which probably won’t be the final release name!).

This will be an independent, full OS/2 implementation for the modern environment, with updated drivers and other software, and all the software that you can run on OS/2 and eComStation will also run on Blue Lion. It will be available in multiple languages.

The focus will be on running a full OS/2 implementation on bare metal, not just in virtual machines, and towards that goal we plan to do a considerable amount of testing on popular, industry-standard hardware.

Development of Blue Lion has started, and as it progresses we will keep you informed of its status and our pricing strategy.

We will not take pre-orders until it’s ready as a saleable product – there is a lot of work to do to get this done, and we currently have a target of the 3rd quarter of 2016.

We at Arca Noae are very excited about this project and what it means for the future of OS/2, and we hope you will be too!